Opportunity Missed – Music Rising


Trying to get the U2/Green Day Song From Music Rising .orgSo U2 and Green Day performed an amazing original collaboration last night on Monday Night Football in the first game at the refurbushed Super Dome in New Orleans last night. This morning I went to download it, first checking iTunes – nope, not there. I then remembered the URL they were promoting during the game, http://www.musicrising.org/ to find out it was being distributed via Rhapsody, which does not run on Macs. When I tried to download the song and give them my $0.99, I got this message.

This is why standards and interoperability is important. How many tens of thousands of dollars did this worthy non-profit leave on the table by choosing a technology partner who was incapable of serving people like me. How many hundreds of thousands of dollars did they leave on the table from people who would not download and install the software?

I had thought this sort of bait for proprietary systems had gone the way of the dodo, but I guess some people never learn…

[ESPN isn’t much better since they made it impossible to directly link to their coverage of this portion of the game, the closes link I could find is here, where you will need to click on the Music Rising link to get some video of what transpired.]

  1. #1 by doctorj - September 26th, 2006 at 09:26

    I tried to download the song too , but it was not a secure page so I couldn’t put my credit card number in.

  2. #2 by Ted R. - September 26th, 2006 at 11:38

    Since well before Real both Listen.com for it’s Rhapsody player, their have been promises of a mac version coming out “soon.” That was the year 2000.

  3. #3 by R(k) - October 16th, 2006 at 17:56

    It’s always a bummer when I read about someone who had a problem because of the OS they use.

    The video is accessible for any platform that can run RealPlayer 10 (Mac, Win and Llinux) and you can watch the vid here:
    http://www.rhapsody.com/musicrising/videopage and see more clips and stuff here: http://www.rhapsody.com/musicrising

    While you can’t buy and download the track on a non-Win platform, you can make a donation.

    BTW- the Rhapsody Jukebox only works on Windows, BUT you can use rhapsody.com on Mac and Linux.

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